On the route I call the Sooner Corridor, I cross a bridge over Crutch Creek near Interstate 40 and no local agency wants to take responsibility for trimming the foliage. In this first image, this is after a full summer’s growth. Note that I’ve cut this back before, last fall, though not so thoroughly as today. I took my limb loppers this time. That thick overhead foliage runs for several meters along the bridge railing.

The only reason I ride on the narrow sidewalk is because traffic here is typically very heavy, stretching back 20-30 cars in two lanes when I usually pass through here. It took the better part of an hour because there were vines intertwined in the limbs. That’s the limb loppers lying on the railing there.

There was a much smaller problem back up at the other end of that same bridge, and then in the other direction was a very large mulberry tree hanging over the sidewalk. I had to be careful trimming that last one because of the dense poison ivy under it. This is all part of an area along Crutch the once was owned by the Pentecostal Holiness Church and used as a summer camp. The place was bought out by a collection of military contractor outfits to house their offices, since Tinker AFB is just a mile away. When Boeing built their own campus next to the south gate, the building were renovated for new tenants and the old camp grounds portion showed up on the maps as a municipal park. It belongs to Midwest City and it gets very little attention, offering no accommodations at all, nor even designated parking. It just so happened there was a small tractor mowing some portion of the park today.

Anyway, I won’t have to worry about being slapped or scraped as I pass by at least until spring.

2 Responses to Time Not Wasted

The times I walk to my bus stop, I take a walking path through a wooded area on the side of a shopping plaza. It’s a common path but sometimes it gets overgrown, and someone once in a while will trim it down nicely. I wonder if it’s a random person, a store owner, or the plaza owner.